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Christmas Bullet
The Christmas Bullet later known as the Cantilever Aero Bullet (sometimes referred to as the Christmas Strutless Biplane) was a single-seat cantilever wing biplane. It is considered by many to be among the worst aircraft ever constructed.
Co-designed with another interesting aviation pioneer, Vincent Burnelli (who only admitted to designing the fuselage), the Bullet was intended to meet a requirement for a military scout plane.
The single-engine biplane was fitted with unbraced cantilevered wings designed to flex during flight. Unfortunately this gross lack of wing strength led to in-flight structural failures of both aircraft on 30 December 1918 and 1 May 1919. This failure aside, the Bullet was noteworthy for being the first or one of the first aircraft to introduce a veneer-clad fuselage to reduce skin-friction drag and interconnected movable ailerons on the wing trailing edge.
Christmas received a patent for the Bullet design in 1914, a fact which he used to make the claim that he had invented the aileron. Dr. Christmas even claimed that the US government bought the rights to his movable ailerons in 1923 for $100,000 to avoid a copyright infringement suit, but there appears to be no evidence to support this claim. In fact, Christmas is only one of many early pioneers who claim to have invented the aileron, including the Wrights and Glenn Curtis.
Doctor William Christmas believed that struts were unnecessary and that an aeroplane's wings should be free to flap like a bird's. Unfortunately, on the first flight of his 'Bullet' fighter, also known as the Christmas Strutless Biplane and by other names, the wings did exactly that and then came adrift. The pilot was killed instantly.
A second Bullet did exactly the same thing a few months later. Christmas claimed all sorts of things, among them that he had 'hundreds' of aeronautical patents and that he was swamped by orders for Bullets from Europe and by million-dollar offers to rebuild Germany's air forces. None of them were true, but he did get the US Army to pay him handsomely for his wing design. Or so he said.
Jim Winchester "The World's Worst Aircraft", 2005
Posted : Tuesday 22nd Dec 2009, 11:09pm
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